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Cristina Siscar

Biography

Cristina Siscar was born in 1947 in Buenos Aires, where she lived until her exile to France in 1979 at the peak of the military dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983). After completing a Profesorado en Letras, and whilst studying for a further degree in Ciencias de la Educación at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), she worked as a secondary school teacher and as a journalist for La Nación. When her university studies were interrupted by political interventions at the UBA in the years immediately preceding the military coup, preventing her from completing her degree, she continued to write poetry, which she had begun as a student and for which she had already won national prizes.

In the early 1970s, Siscar became politically active in militant Marxist circles that opposed the economic inequality and the increasingly repressive atmosphere that would be exacerbated under military rule after the coup d’état in 1976. In the climate of persecution leading up to the dictatorship, her apartment was ransacked by the police in 1975; at the peak of her activism in 1977, her husband was kidnapped and ‘disappeared by’ the military, along with her sister and brother-in-law. Siscar eventually went into exile in 1979, firstly to Brazil, and then to Paris where she remained for nearly seven years until 1986. In Paris, Siscar resumed writing, publishing her first volume of poetry there in a bilingual (French/Spanish) edition before returning to Buenos Aires in 1986, where she still lives.

Whilst she acquired French during the six years spent in exile in Paris, she has only ever written in her native Spanish in both fictional and non-fictional works that consider the disruptions and ruptures that are the immediate consequences of exile, as well as the enduring fragmentation and ‘inbetweenness’ that are its lasting legacies. To date, Siscar has published four volumes of short stories, a novel, an essay, a children’s book, a volume of poetry, and she has edited four volumes of short stories.